i’m not street smart

March 11, 2009

Today I had an 8:30 am meeting. This is quite unusual for me, I don’t usually have meetings that early unless it’s to meet for a dawn patrol ski/hike outing.

Oh, and today, the kids were all gone to school by 7:30, and Kim left at 7:35, and I left at 8. That is, my immediate family was all occupied elsewhere.

So I stop at the Chevron at the bottom of the hill for a drink, return to my car, and pull on the door latch. You know how when you do that when the door is locked, but you don’t know the door is locked, how it kills your fingers because your fingers weren’t expecting the door to be locked? It was like that.

I wasn’t expecting the door to be locked because I had left the key to the door INSIDE the car, and so if the door was locked, and the key was inside, well, that would be stupid, right?

It gets worse. Kim was gone, and as I was calling Shelle, who lives on the hill by me, to see if she could stop at my house and get the spare key (which I wasn’t even sure we had, which I’ll explain in a second) to bring down to me, I watched her drive past the Chevron on the way to the gym.

Sleepy was at work already, but his wife, Jay, was not. Yay.

So Jay picked me up, we dropped boy number 1 off at school, and then she drove me up the hill to my house, to see what we had there, key-wise.

We had what you see in the picture above.

See, the car is a 1998 Toyota Landcruiser, and the key fob (a fantastic word) had been falling apart for years. I had glued it, duct taped it, glued and taped it again, until it just wouldn’t stay together anymore. So we were stuck with the backup key, which had no buttons, but jeez, it isn’t too much trouble to open the door the old fashioned way, right? Not as bad as rolling down windows the old fashioned way.

I wasn’t comfortable with just the one limited key, so I went to a locksmith and had a backup made. Except in modern cars, those cheap backups won’t actually START a car, because they lack the magic chip. But that’s okay, I’ll make do with a backup key that just OPENS the car. And I bought several of those nice hidden key pouches so the backup key would always be available.

I did all this about 3 months ago. Guess where I found the hidden key pouch? Yup, in the drawer with the backup key. Still in its original packaging.

So now I have an empty, in-origina- packaging hidden key pouch, the pieces of the fat end of an old key FOB that will cost $75 at the dealer to replace, a retarded (apologies to retarded people and their friends) backup key that won’t start the car, and a secretly chipped backup key that will start the car, but only locks it the old-fashioned way.

But now that I’ve successfully gotten to work, albeit 2 hours late, how soon do you think I’ll be installing that backup hidden key pouch?

The key to our rental car broke during our honeymoon. Broke off right where the rubber meets the metal. My husband ran to the hardware store and got a “replacement” key — that didn’t have the chip. But… (and it’s not supposed to work this way) by holding the broken computer chip part of the old key right next to the new chipless key, we could start the car. Most of the time. It was annoying, but we saved the money for the new key. It eventually stopped working this way, and my husband was afraid we wouldn’t be able to get the car started again, so he pumped gas while the car was running. It freaked me out! He tried to reassure me by telling me that race cars do this all the time.

this morning on my 65 mile commute i waited until the needle was on E (about 1/2 way to work) before getting gas. I did this because I like to feel like I have made some progress before pulling off the highway. Well, when I got out to pump, it turned out I forgot my wallet at home. So I had to scrounge all of the change from my pockets and from the crevices in my car and buy a grand total of 1.45 worth of gas. This just barely got me home so I could get my wallet, fill the tank (now well past the E line), and leave for work again. I arrived at work nearly 3 hours after I left. It was awesome.